Teaching in HCMC
I see that it's been over two months since I've posted anything here, and I seem to recall saying last time that I would try to do weekly postings. Well, I'm going to try again.
Things have been interesting here in the city. I started teaching English about a month and a half ago at one of the language centers. I have six different classes, and the students range from around 4 (I've never asked how old some of the kids are in the class with the youngest kids, but a few of them can't possibly be older) to 17 years old. The classes with the younger kids are fun, but very tiring. They can't really do much on their own, so I have to be constantly teaching. Teaching Vietnamese children English, as you probably would expect, is rather different from providing legal advice to the mentally-ill, the drug-addicted, and, sometimes, the simply morally-deficient people who find themselves in the criminal justice system. But who knows, maybe I'll will incorporate the use of bear-children puppets into the practice of law if I return to it.
Teaching English can be fun, but I prefer teaching at the university. Although teaching at the university certainly involves teaching English as well. I'm teaching in an American university program that uses the facilities of one the Vietnamese universities and offers students American university diplomas. Strangely, the university is North Central University, located in Prescott, Arizona, where we had been living before we went to Vietnam. NCU in the US is really an online for-profit university, much like the University of Phoenix. The course I'm teaching now is "Environmental Issues." I was hoping we would use a book of readings, perhaps some pro and con articles about the threat of various environmental problems and possible solutions. But instead a book had already been selected that is really a textbook on environmental politics in the West, probably intended for upper-division political science courses. (It was probably chosen only because it's the only textbook on the environment in English that was available here.) The chapter titles are things like: "environmental philosophy," "green political thought," "green parties," "policy instruments and implementation," etc. I think the average US university student would find it very difficult to understand; for my students it must be completely incomprehensible. I've selected a few of the chapters to use, but will have to come up with other materials to use in discussing the issues we should discuss like climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, etc.
Last week I did some basic critical thinking stuff with my classes and also talked about what we mean by environmental issues. I also thought that if we were supposed to cover advanced topics about Western politics, we really needed a short introduction to the basics of Western politics, so I talked about the political spectrum and the political parties of the US. The students seemed to enjoy this and really didn't know much about the parties and their positions. I tried to avoid anything that could offend the government here, although I did mention that in the west the spectrum is often described as being horseshoe-shaped with the extreme left (which I described as "Soviet-style communism") and the extreme right (fascism) coming close together in some ways. But I didn't (and won't here) say much more than that.
This week, at least in one section, we began the chapter on environmental philosophy, a subject that I've had some interest in over the last several years. Again, it seemed that before beginning to discuss environmental ethics, we needed to talk a little bit about ethics in general. Even in the section with the more fluent English, I felt I need to take some time just to make sure they knew what I mean by "ethics." But I suppose even in an introductory philosophy course in an English-speaking country, you'd begin this way. I asked them about the sources of traditional Vietnamese ethics and I didn't get much of a response. But when I mentioned Buddhism and Confuscianism, they knew what I was talking about, and could give examples. One of the students mentioned the many Vietnamese sayings about ethics. I asked them for an example, and they agreed an important one is "uong nuoc nho nguon," "drink water, remember the source." (I understood the "drink water, remember . . ., but didn't yet know "nguon," "source" The topic for the day being environmental ethics, I was happy and thought they had given me a saying about protecting watersheds, but really, I learned from the students, it's about being grateful to the people who provide you with things like food and water.
I was becoming concerned that the students, all business majors, would find topics like this boring and a waste of time, but we actually had a pretty good discussion, which is unusual for a couple of reasons: 1) class discussion is not an important part of Vietnamese education (regurgitating on the test what the lecturer has said in class seems to be the emphasis) and 2) for most of them, their English is not at a high enough level that they feel very comfortable talking about things like this in English. We were able to find some connections between pretty abstract western philosophical terms, like ecocentrism, and strains of Vietnamese culture, like Buddhism. For example, when discussing whether non-human species have intrinsic value (the position of the ecocentrists), one of the students pointed out that Buddhists generally believe non-human animal species have souls and therefore have intrinsic value.
Well, I've gone on too long already about class, but I have to mention that I had the opportunity (for a reason that would take too long to explain, but I will say it had to do with alleged biblical sources of anthropocentrism mentioned in the textbook) to tell the story of Noah's Ark to Vietnamese university students, a majority of whom were hearing it for the first time.
I'm home alone. Hoa's travelling with our friends Lisa and David who are here visiting from Prescott. They're in Hoi An right now, which I'm sure Lisa, especially, must really like, given all the traditional arts and crafts that are practiced there. I couldn't go because I had to work. They'll get back tomorrow night (Friday) and then fly home Saturday. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to spend a lot of time with them, because I'm working and they're only here for about 9 days. But we were all able to go out for grilled goat, one of my favorite dishes, and goat hotpot, with Lisa and David, Hoa's cousin's girlfriend (also Hoa), one of Hoa's second cousins from Dak Lak province ("Dung," which is pronounced more like "Yoom"), our Chinese friend Maggie, a another young Chinese woman who taught with Hoa at her old school, and our Japanese neighbor, who we just met. It was really fun, and Lisa, who lived in Japan for a little over a year, was able to brush up on her Japanese a little bit. Thinking about grilled goat is making me hungry, so it's time to go eat.
Tom
Things have been interesting here in the city. I started teaching English about a month and a half ago at one of the language centers. I have six different classes, and the students range from around 4 (I've never asked how old some of the kids are in the class with the youngest kids, but a few of them can't possibly be older) to 17 years old. The classes with the younger kids are fun, but very tiring. They can't really do much on their own, so I have to be constantly teaching. Teaching Vietnamese children English, as you probably would expect, is rather different from providing legal advice to the mentally-ill, the drug-addicted, and, sometimes, the simply morally-deficient people who find themselves in the criminal justice system. But who knows, maybe I'll will incorporate the use of bear-children puppets into the practice of law if I return to it.
Teaching English can be fun, but I prefer teaching at the university. Although teaching at the university certainly involves teaching English as well. I'm teaching in an American university program that uses the facilities of one the Vietnamese universities and offers students American university diplomas. Strangely, the university is North Central University, located in Prescott, Arizona, where we had been living before we went to Vietnam. NCU in the US is really an online for-profit university, much like the University of Phoenix. The course I'm teaching now is "Environmental Issues." I was hoping we would use a book of readings, perhaps some pro and con articles about the threat of various environmental problems and possible solutions. But instead a book had already been selected that is really a textbook on environmental politics in the West, probably intended for upper-division political science courses. (It was probably chosen only because it's the only textbook on the environment in English that was available here.) The chapter titles are things like: "environmental philosophy," "green political thought," "green parties," "policy instruments and implementation," etc. I think the average US university student would find it very difficult to understand; for my students it must be completely incomprehensible. I've selected a few of the chapters to use, but will have to come up with other materials to use in discussing the issues we should discuss like climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, etc.
Last week I did some basic critical thinking stuff with my classes and also talked about what we mean by environmental issues. I also thought that if we were supposed to cover advanced topics about Western politics, we really needed a short introduction to the basics of Western politics, so I talked about the political spectrum and the political parties of the US. The students seemed to enjoy this and really didn't know much about the parties and their positions. I tried to avoid anything that could offend the government here, although I did mention that in the west the spectrum is often described as being horseshoe-shaped with the extreme left (which I described as "Soviet-style communism") and the extreme right (fascism) coming close together in some ways. But I didn't (and won't here) say much more than that.
This week, at least in one section, we began the chapter on environmental philosophy, a subject that I've had some interest in over the last several years. Again, it seemed that before beginning to discuss environmental ethics, we needed to talk a little bit about ethics in general. Even in the section with the more fluent English, I felt I need to take some time just to make sure they knew what I mean by "ethics." But I suppose even in an introductory philosophy course in an English-speaking country, you'd begin this way. I asked them about the sources of traditional Vietnamese ethics and I didn't get much of a response. But when I mentioned Buddhism and Confuscianism, they knew what I was talking about, and could give examples. One of the students mentioned the many Vietnamese sayings about ethics. I asked them for an example, and they agreed an important one is "uong nuoc nho nguon," "drink water, remember the source." (I understood the "drink water, remember . . ., but didn't yet know "nguon," "source" The topic for the day being environmental ethics, I was happy and thought they had given me a saying about protecting watersheds, but really, I learned from the students, it's about being grateful to the people who provide you with things like food and water.
I was becoming concerned that the students, all business majors, would find topics like this boring and a waste of time, but we actually had a pretty good discussion, which is unusual for a couple of reasons: 1) class discussion is not an important part of Vietnamese education (regurgitating on the test what the lecturer has said in class seems to be the emphasis) and 2) for most of them, their English is not at a high enough level that they feel very comfortable talking about things like this in English. We were able to find some connections between pretty abstract western philosophical terms, like ecocentrism, and strains of Vietnamese culture, like Buddhism. For example, when discussing whether non-human species have intrinsic value (the position of the ecocentrists), one of the students pointed out that Buddhists generally believe non-human animal species have souls and therefore have intrinsic value.
Well, I've gone on too long already about class, but I have to mention that I had the opportunity (for a reason that would take too long to explain, but I will say it had to do with alleged biblical sources of anthropocentrism mentioned in the textbook) to tell the story of Noah's Ark to Vietnamese university students, a majority of whom were hearing it for the first time.
I'm home alone. Hoa's travelling with our friends Lisa and David who are here visiting from Prescott. They're in Hoi An right now, which I'm sure Lisa, especially, must really like, given all the traditional arts and crafts that are practiced there. I couldn't go because I had to work. They'll get back tomorrow night (Friday) and then fly home Saturday. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to spend a lot of time with them, because I'm working and they're only here for about 9 days. But we were all able to go out for grilled goat, one of my favorite dishes, and goat hotpot, with Lisa and David, Hoa's cousin's girlfriend (also Hoa), one of Hoa's second cousins from Dak Lak province ("Dung," which is pronounced more like "Yoom"), our Chinese friend Maggie, a another young Chinese woman who taught with Hoa at her old school, and our Japanese neighbor, who we just met. It was really fun, and Lisa, who lived in Japan for a little over a year, was able to brush up on her Japanese a little bit. Thinking about grilled goat is making me hungry, so it's time to go eat.
Tom
posted by Tom Holz | 2:02 AM
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